The Caregiver's Dilemma by Lisa Duggan

  TheMamaFesto: @ motherhoodmag Same old same old : ) I'm in a weird space of "things seem ok" & waiting for the other shoe to drop LOL

motherhoodmag: TheMamaFesto I'm no longer waiting for the other shoe, that dropped a while ago—& some boots & sneakers. I'm going out to buy a shoe rack.

Today started like any other Monday.  The alarm clock rang, we cajoled the child from bed, somebody showered, and we were out the door by 8. After drop-off  I sat parked in the station lot, sipping my coffee and doing one of my favorite things — reading Twitter. I read a few links, reTweeted some others and caught up with my favorite blogs and virtual friends, including MamaFesto.

Oh, the world was still going to shit all around me — as NPR let me know — but for that half hour in my immediate little world, in the 5 x 5 space of the heated front seat, all was peaceful. Alice was in school, hubby was at the office and the babysitter was covering pick-up, giving me an extended workday. The next eight hours were mine.


But first there were all those dropped shoes to think about.

In the last year, on both sides of my and my husband's families, our parents have suffered extraordinary health problems that have required our attention, our time and increasingly our assistance.

Or rather, my attention, my time and my assistance.

As anyone doing the stay-at-home gig knows, much of the work we do is unquantifiable. It's not measured in hours, initiatives or projects completed as it's done in the corporate world, but in conversations — time spent talking about and listening to the needs of those we care for, and in taking the action necessary to provide that care. 

Which usually means more conversations — with doctors, appliance repair people, teachers, babysitters, landscapers. Anything that happens during the day, at the house, is our domain. So, in addition to making sure there are clean clothes and food for when people get home, I'm the one calling the insurance adjustor and the contractor when a freak storm takes out a piece of our carport.

In the case of our parents, it has meant numerous hospital visits,  arranging home-care, or waiting for a phone call telling the result of a scary test. It has meant signing one parent up for on-line bill-paying to make sure the property insurance gets paid (by me), and discussing end-of-life requests with the other. It has meant spending weekdays, and weekends, traveling back and forth to Staten Island and Queens.


All the while, I keep things moving. Lunches get made and homework is done and our own bills are paid, sometimes late, but they are. The Parent du Jour keeps chugging along (thanks in large part to Ms. @KDWald) and other friends help by taking my daughter for long playdates and sleepovers so I can catch up.  I cry in the shower or in the car, because there's no other time to process the emotional fallout of what's happening and because I don't want to frighten my little girl. 

It's been tough, (she said, in the understatement of the year), but I keep going. These are the most important people in the world to me; my daughter, my husband, my parents, my in-laws. They are the world, to me. The dilemma is not in finding the way to keep my commitments to them all, but to keep my mind on the clock. 

I may not like the way we're spending our time these days— solving problems or putting out fires, rather than taking trips or celebrating milestones — but that's not for me to say. 

Someday we'll all be gone. 

I want to go knowing I gave the people I love everything I had while we were still here, together.

A Pacifist Contemplates the Value of Conflict on Veterans Day by Lisa Duggan

This post has been removed by the author.

BLOG-IN! SPEAK OUT! Parents Send a Letter To Washington

* Today, across the web, bloggers will be simultaneously posting this letter as a new form of democratic protest called the Blog-In. I am just one of many. Click here to see a full list of the writers participating. (Our hashtag on Twitter is #BlogIn2011.)

You are invited to join, too. Simply copy & paste this letter on your blog, Facebook or Google+ page—and let your voice be heard.

Dear 2012 Presidential Candidates,

We are your future constituents and we are parents.

We are American mothers and fathers and grandparents and guardians. Our families might be the most diverse in the world. Blended and combined in endless permutations, we represent every major religion, political ideology and ethnic culture that exists. We are made from equal parts biology and choice. Our children come to us in every way possible—including fertility miracles, adoption, and remarriage.

Our very modern families embody the freedom that defines America. We embody America. We are rich in diversity, but we are united in our family values. We come together today, with one voice, to express our grave disappointment in the national political discourse.

The 2012 countdown has barely begun and we are already bombarded with the warmed-over, hypocritical rhetoric of 2008. We are living in a time where 15.1% of Americans now live in poverty, the unemployment rate stands at 16%, and we are spending close to $170 billion annually between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given the current state of affairs we would expect every candidate to focus on the issues that truly matter: job creation, debt-relief, taxes, education, poverty, and ending the war(s). Instead, it is already clear to us that the conversation has been hijacked, with the goal of further polarizing our nation into a politically motivated and falsely created class-war.

We will not stand for another campaign year in which politicians presume to know what our family values are as they relate to the nation.

To be clear, here are our family values:

•  Affordable health care, including family planning, for all Americans. We will not tolerate any candidate using the shield of “Choice” to blind us from the issues that really matter. When funding is stripped from organizations like Planned Parenthood, access to sliding-scale health care (including yearly pap smears & mammograms), comprehensive sex education, and family planning is blocked from the poorest of the population.

•  Access to education, and the ability to actually use it. We want quality, affordable, federally-funded full-day, pre-K programs made available in every State, in order to provide an even starting point for all children enrolled in public schools— regardless of the wealth of the district or town they live in.

•  A reinstatement of regulations for banks issuing mortgages and full prosecution for those who engaged in fraud. We want full accountability —investigation, indictment and prosecution— of those individuals and financial institutions who engaged in fraudulent lending practices and who helped create the massive foreclosures that left many families homeless or struggling to keep their homes.

•  A return of strict environmental regulations protecting water, air, food, and land that were removed in the last two decades. We want our children to grow up in a world not weighed down by the strains of pollution and global warming. Between BPA in our products, sky-rocketing rates of asthma in kids, questionable hormones in our over-processed food, and more, we need leaders who will put our needs and safety over the desires and profits of large corporations.

Family planning, healthcare, education, economic solvency and environmental safety: these are our national family values.

Candidates who demonstrate the ability to understand the gravity of these issues, and their impact on our families, and who can provide actual, viable solutions to these problems will garner our support and our votes.

We believe in our democratic system, and we'll continue to use our voices and our votes to see that it reaches its fullest potential.

Sincerely,

Your future constituents,

The Mothers & Fathers of America

If you would like to forward this letter to your elected officials, you can find their contact info at the following links: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtm


To see who else is participating in #BlogIn2011, please click here.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


* On the origin of this letter.

It was directly after watching one of the Republican debates in October.
All I could think was: Not. Another. Year. Of. This. Bullshit.

I think it was when Rick Perry said something ridiculous about Planned Parenthood, or Michelle Bachman denounced vaccine science, or Mitt Romney's shiny hair painfully blinded me, just for a moment, and I stubbed my toe...but does it really matter which absurd moment of the debate triggered my pain and outrage?

My country, our country, is in serious, deep, trouble and these idiots offered nothing substantive for solving the problems before us. So I sat down to write the tirade that would become this letter. The original piece included sentences like this:

"[A]n administration that aided and abetted the corporate behemoths that dictate our fiscal policies as they robbed us blind; an administration that thoroughly gutted and dismantled the environmental and financial regulations that kept us safe and solvent, at their bequest."

With the help of a more reasonable and skilled writer, Ms. Avital Nathman, we uncovered the issues and values behind the outrage, and made a list of what should be discussed, what must be addressed — if we are to survive — and hammered them into this, this.... Blog-In.

The first of it's kind. (We think.)

Thanks for reading. Thanks for circulating the letter to your friends and family on Facebook, or  adding it to your own blog, even after today is done.

Thanks, to these beautiful bloggers, for posting along with us on Tuesday, November 8, 2011.

Thanks — to everyone participating — for believing that a small thing, like writing a letter, is important; for knowing that our voices matter, and for hoping that together, we can create meaningful change that delivers a better future to our children.

— Lisa Duggan

JOIN US NOVEMBER 8 FOR THE FIRST "BLOG-IN"

On NOVEMBER 8 2011, we launch the first ever Blog-In, a new form of democratic protest that honors the historical roots of the non-violent "sit-in", and the contemporary domestic and international occupiers of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

By simultaneously posting an open letter to the 2012 Presidential Candidates, we parent-bloggers intend to make known what we hold as our national family values — as opposed to the political rhetoric that is often dished out in a campaign year.

To learn more about the Blog-In, why it was created, by whom, and how you can participate, please click here:


The Mamafesto: Blog-in! Speak-out!